


Fool Moon

by mustinvestigate



Series: Nora Freis [5]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: F/M, Frenemies, Worldbuilding, neutral karma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-04 06:43:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11549655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustinvestigate/pseuds/mustinvestigate
Summary: Nothing to see here, just some sheltered shithead teenagers shoved into crushing responsibility…





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> From the [Major Arcana Inspired Character Ask](http://and-orlesian-feathers.tumblr.com/post/137675915014/major-arcana-inspired-character-asks), “fool” and “moon” requested by [chocochipbiscuit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChocoChipBiscuit)…answered not sensibly but with rambling world-buildy story, set elsewhere and long ago in the Nora Freis ‘verse.

Life under the new Overseer Almodovar, well…his Ma has a point: “All hail the new boss, same as the old boss.” The big vault door was open, sure, if by “open” you mean “sealed up tighter than Susie Mack on prom night and hounded by at least three armed pricks every damn second...again, like Susie Mack on prom night.”

They’ll be stepping out any day now, yeah, just as soon as ‘Mata’s dragged each memory, rumor, and nightmare about the wasteland outside from every doddering greyhair left in the vault. What’s out there, more radroaches? Bigger radroaches? _Worse_ than radroaches? And what’ll people out there want? What can they take out of the vault that wastelanders’ll think is worth buying, but not worth breaking in and killing them all to just haul off for free?

Amata hasn’t learned much, and what they could tell her, she doesn’t like. They’d had someone who could help, who knows a hell of a lot more than anyone else inside, but…well…there hadn’t exactly been much time for catching up.

_How’s your dad?_

_Dead. Yours?_

_Uh…not dead. But, a little, possibly, trying to kill us. Kind of._

_I’ll take care of him._

Yeah. She took care of him, all right. Her and the two long tall sacks of puke she dragged home with her, the guys she insisted were both human even if they looked and stank like something scraped out of a long-rusted sewage valve.

So, yeah. The door stays closed, and Amata keeps their noses to the grindstone as bad as her daddy ever did, stockpiling water and meds and anything else she guesses might-could sell outside.

If they ever open that big door. His Ma, now nearly as restless as him to get at that big new world, has opinions on that which get punctuated with broken glass. But Butch cuts Amata some slack, not just for the obvious reason that Wally likes to point out every morning he catches the Overseer sneaking outta Butch’s quarters, but because when the shit hits the intake circulator, she knows who really has her back.

What kinda shit? Well, how ‘bout the official vault radio station getting hijacked through the whole breakfast hour, looping a familiar snarl across the intercom: “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, and…oh, yeah – fuck you! Fucking fools think you’re going to take on the wastes when you haven’t even noticed me at your front door dozen times this week? You’re all going to die. Horribly. Die horribly.”

Amata pulls him outta the barber shop and dismisses the guards, sending them back to Brock’s classroom with the rest of the kindergarteners. Just the real grown-ups to face whatever Lona left outside. Some kinda fiendish trap, probably, like that crazy electrical arch Dr Brainwash used to knock out and kidnap Grognak, or a big slingshot set to fling a mini-nuke deep into the hallway as soon as the door opens, or maybe just frag mines lining every inch of the cave outside, so many they could never disarm one before the rest blew.

Or, worst of all, maybe Lona herself.

‘Mata hesitates at the vault door control, her margarine-wouldn’t-melt dictator’s face cracking like Handy Andy tried to pat her cheek, but he’s got no idea what she’s expecting him to do about it. They don’t got that kinda thing. A little song, a little dance, bottle of whiskey and a coupla cigarettes, pretending he’s asleep when she sniffles against his back, that’s their thing. Maybe if her dad was still around to bar the door forever, if there wasn’t a whole world of hot-to-trot dames waiting out there, maybe they’d give it a shot. Pretend they gave a shit about each other. But ol’ Alphonse is gone, and so’s Lona, and so…

So Amata punches the door release and scampers ahead, poking her head out first, and he lets her.

“What the…” She drops her dad’s old 10-mil and pushes the security helmet off her head. “Butch, get out here!”

The first thing he sees is the pile of old bones, a skull rolling under his boot and nearly toppling him, and for a moment it makes a kind of sense. That was a Lona-style threat, piling the bodies of her victims up like a vault cat leaving ‘roach legs in your bunk. But then his eyes adjust to the cave’s slightly dingier gloom than the fluorescent light behind them and there’s Amata up to her knees in a pile of goodies like Santa caught up on 19 years all at once. A helmet outta one of those old army posters bounces off the heap as she digs out an assault rifle.

“What in the goddamn…?”

“There’s a letter.”

He picks it up and reads: “ _Enjoy the gear, you ungrateful shitheads. I’m only providing it in hopes you’ll get more than ten feet into the wastes before it snuffs you out, just long enough to die more interestingly than tripping on a rock and breaking your neck, and realise how pathetically unprepared you are for the real world you so casually banished me to, as if I wanted to come ‘home’…_ ”

He shifts the paper to one hand to make little radroach antennas with his fingers so Amata knows Lona doesn’t really consider the vault home. “It goes on like this for a while before she gets to the personal threats.”

“Oh, god, give it here.”

She mumble-reads a few sentences: “ _Amata, I hope you die in a Paradise Falls slave pen with a collar around your neck and the last words, ‘I’m telling my daddy!’ on your lips. Stanley, how about you catch tetanus from the very first rusty pipe you try to tap for a drink? My darling Wally, please go directly to the Germantown Police HQ and volunteer for an FEV dip – forget the Tunnel Snakes, that’s the gang for a real man like you!_ Oh, Butch, she’s got one for everyone left alive in here. How’d she even remember who to leave off – she was home for, like, an hour!”

“What’s she say about me?”

She runs a finger down the paper, her lips forming strange words: _Mirelurk. Deathclaw. Outcasts_. “Let’s see…ok, DeLoria: you’re supposed to be an indentured hooker slave to someone named Moriarty…no, wait, that’s aimed at your mom.”

“Oh, _fuck_ you, Ilona,” he growls. “Ma loved you, you stupid bitch.”

“Yeah…you, you’re supposed to choke on the booze this Moriarty guy makes out of his own piss.”

“His own…he…” Despite himself, Butch chuckles. That’s the girl who’d given him a fat lip at least once a month since they could both walk. “They make booze outta piss outside? Shit. Maybe we should stay in after all.”

“We’ll definitely need tetanus shots,” Amata muses, still reading. “And a rabies vaccine, too, given what she says will happen to Christine in a molerat pit.”

“And avoid anyone named ‘Moriarty’.”

“God, yes. Maybe we should sell some of Stanley’s moonshine. If they’re drinking fermented piss, it’ll be a step up.”

“I mean, not a big one, but…”

“Yeah, but at least they’ll already be used to the taste.” Amata rolls her eyes, carefully folding the papers filled from edge to edge with Lona’s vicious scrawl. “You know, this is actually useful intel, if I can survive six pages of verbal poison.”

“You think that’s by accident?” he scoffs. “You’ve met Ilona, right?”

“Yeah,” she sighs, her lips softening for just a heartbeat before pursing tight again, then picks up a chest protector. “Okay, get your pipboy up and start taking inventory.”

“I’m not your secretary,” he grumbles, already typing up a few ideas on how they’ll pick the right people to go out.

* * *

“Honey, that helmet’s squashing your hair.”

“Leave it, Ma.”

Butch complained to anyone who’d listen about getting partnered up with dear ol’ Ma on his first trade mission – anyone, that was, except Amata. Not that she won’t listen, she would, but she also might re-assign him.

“I’m just saying, maybe there’s a nice young lady or two in this Megaton. No reason they should meet my son looking like some kinda bean-eating hobo.”

“I like beans, Ma.” He twiddles his finger for her to turn around and tightens up the back strap on her armor plate. It’s black except for a white logo of something called the Talon Company that Lona predicts will torture Stevie Mack to death over several agonising days. “Maybe I wanna marry a bean-cooking hobo gal.”

He won’t tell no one how proud he is his Ma aced the competitions ‘Mata set, weeding out anyone she decided couldn’t handle deathclaws and mirelurks and slavers and everything else Lona called down on them out there. His Ma shot the man-shaped target on the atrium wall better than anyone else, even if more bullets landed in the crotch than the head, and hauled a pack almost as heavy as herself the whole way up from the sub-sub-sub-storage level in one long, steady trip. No one else, not even the Mack brothers or Butch himself, managed that without a break. Now the rest of the vault knows what he always did: nothing gets in his Ma’s way, not for something worth giving a shit over. There’s no one else in the whole damn vault, at least with Ilona gone, that he’d want watching his back more.

“I raised you better than that.”

“No, you didn’t.”

She slaps his shoulder. “None of your sass, Butchie. Have you got the map?”

“For the hundredth time, yes!” He rolls his eyes so hard it rocks his whole head, but she only smiles.

“Okay, baby boy, I’m just checking. You ready to head out?”

“God, yes.” When she tries to loop her hand in his elbow, he throws his arm around her shoulders instead, shifting his assault rifle to the other hand. “Let’s go paint this town red.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Out!”

Belle slams the bar next to his head for what’s definitely not the first time but probably no more than the third, given she hasn’t threatened to sic Brock on him. He rides out the jolt to his throbbing skull and tries to convince himself he’s got more than three caps in his pocket and can talk her into a final round. But, no, it was a slow day. Only two ungrateful assholes wanted their lice-ridden manes shaved off, one of whom actually tried to stab him when he suggested the man try some of his homebrewed pomade and got carried off by security without tipping.

All in all, a fucking banner day, here in good ol’ Rivet City. Home Sweet Rusting Filth Bucket.

“Set ‘em up again, Belle. I’ll haul him out after.”

Her. Of course it’s her. It’s not like he’s been sitting here waiting. Sure as hell not killing time in his little corner of the market with the stool and the cracked mirror, flipping his switchblade and thinking of the thick braid that’d hang in front of him in class, begging for a little trim from Toothpick. Or those rolls of fat over her hips that the vault suits cruelly showed off so much that grabbing them with a shouted “It’s the Chub Squad, and boy I collared a whale!” was _almost_ unnecessary. Definitely not remembering that scrawny stranger in stained armor, stinking of smoke and rotted who-the-fuck-knows-what, face so filthy that the old Overseer’s splattered blood mighta actually cleaned it up a little.

He was damn careful not to think of...of this. Black hair tied back so tight her scalp squeaks, arms of her vault suit knotted around her waist, showing off the two snakes on a stick she let Freddie needle onto her shoulder after the GOAT somehow stuck their generation with a “tattoo artist”. Smelling like soap and blown ammo and a little like she just sweat out the gym with the other billy-club bullies in Security. 101 Lona. _His_ Lona, a fuck-you on two legs even slinging nothing more dangerous than an old pair of binoculars on a leather strap around her neck.

Her face carries a few cuts it didn’t back in the day, on her chin and cheek and forehead, so faint they’re practically wasteland beauty marks. There’s a gouge in her temple, too, deep and stitched up bad but healing up good. Doc’s daughter hasn’t let her scalpel get rusty out here.

“Hey, look what the yaoguai dragged in,” he drawls. “How they hanging, ol’ Four-Eyes-No-Tits?”

The second half hasn’t been accurate in years - as he knows damn well - but the nickname’s got history. They’ve got history.

“Low and lazy, _dupek_ , just like you.”

“You can both haul ass - ”

Lona puts a couple of strange, spiky rocks on the bar - no, not rocks. Rocks don’t squish. Belle shuts her near-toothless mouth, gives one of them a suspicious sniff, then leaves two shot glasses and a fresh bottle of whiskey in front of them.

“Lock up when y’go.”

Butch watches in amazement as Belle disappears into the back room, leaving all her booze tucked away in a single-latch footlocker - practically giving it away!

“She trusts you?”

“Harkness once let me gun down a couple of assholes in the market.” She pours the hooch - more into her glass than his, of course. “That makes me one of the good guys.”

He swipes the bottle out of her hand. “Have they met you?”

“Unlike Brotch, people out here grade on a curve.”

“Huh. Yeah. Good old Brotch-the-Crotch. If shit really goes bad, they’ll send him out with a slide rule and no coffee to lecture the whole damn wastes into submission.”

“ _Gowno_ , no one out here deserves that.”

She plays with her empty glass, then reaches for the full one instead of the bottle wonderglued to his fingers. Still a smart girl, that Lona.

“Heard about Ellen,” she says and throws back his shot, wiping her lips on the goosebumped skin behind her pipboy. “Damn, Butch, but I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well…” She still drinks like they’re hiding behind the purifier with Freddie and ‘Mata, gulping down the evidence before some prick from the Mack tribe catches them. It used to make Ma laugh, when they were grown and could drink right out in the open, sinking a bottle or two in the rec room watching Bing and Bob flickering on the screen, pretending like they got eyes for any dame but each other for the millionth time. _Slow down, honey, that’s the good stuff. They’re not making any more of it._ “What the fuck do you have to be sorry about?”

She doesn’t snap back, just lets the rusty groans of the old hull and incoming tide talk for her until he looks away first. “Maybe I shouldn’t’ve encouraged you idiots.”

“That was encouragement?”

“Much as I could manage right then.” She pushes the weird fruit around the bar with one finger. “I’d’ve come sooner, but...I needed a break from all this. Took a vacation. Didn’t hear until I got back by Megaton.”

Butch chases the little ping that strange word, _vacation_ , makes down the disused levels of his memory, thinks of crumbling old magazines in the atrium leisure centre. _Better Homes. Live & Love._ _Housewives’ Choice_. Happy family on sand by deep blue water, Mom and Sis and Baby, Dad’s pipe clenched in a tight maniac’s grin, the whole shebang only fifty thousand backs a weekend. “So you blew this popstand, went down the ocean?”

She blinks, and then she laughs, with a smoker’s hacksaw edge she never had back in the vault. “Actually...yeah. You wouldn’t believe the prizes I won on the boardwalk.”

“Great. Glad you had fun.”

She ignores his jab, twice now, and that’s definitely not the old Lona she’s dressed up as, not until she climbs over the bar and pops open Belle’s stash to liberate a Nuka Cola. But then she chucks a handful of bottlecaps into the locker and thumps it shut hard enough for the lock to snap back in place, and she’s a stranger again. “Heard from Doc Hoff that Ellen saved one of their caravan guards.”

“Only because Wolfgang brought those no-dick mutie fucks down on us when he heard his friend hollering.”

He can still hear Wolfgang’s choked _damn, damn, damn_ , leaning over her body, then sharp, _Don’t come over here. You just go let Philly outta that cage. Don’t c’mere until I can...don’t come over here._ And his stupid feet obeying, walking away like Wolfgang and Ma were just at it again and kicked him out of camp for gagging in their stupid kissy faces. Wolfgang had her wrapped up tight in an old tarp when he got back with the guard, already dragging rubble over her, snapping _What, you want the ferals to get at her?_ when Butch didn't jump to help. Fucking Philly bitching behind them about how cold and hungry he was, all through the quick burial, drowning out the brahmin's snorts the whole walk to Rivet City, until Butch couldn’t think of anything but what a shitty trade Wolfgang’d made, or of marching Philly right back to that stinking den before it was too late to return him, put a bullet in his brain instead and pull his Ma up right as rain outta that shitty little grave.

“Ma killed the one with the minigun. Since she had the plasma rifle, right? I’d cover her, she’d get behind ‘em...worked a dozen times. This time...she got between a fence and a frag grenade. Melts a big bastard’s skull into fizzly goo, and then a stupid little popper gets her.” He forces another gulp down his throat and rubs his eyes, not trying to hide the dribble that sneaks outta one. Hell, it’s only Lona. “It’s not fair.”

“That's how it goes,” she says, with a bartender’s professional sympathy, and picks up Belle’s filthy rag to rub at the evening’s gummy residue. Her hand brushes his until he lifts it out of her path, letting her mop up the interlocking beer rings he’d worked on all evening.

“Y’know she told people out here she was my sister?”

Lona snorts. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. No one believed she was old enough to be my Ma. Just because she had all her teeth, and nice hair, she was the belle a’the Canterbury beltway.”

“Tell me about it.” Lona kicks the locker open again, tucking away the mushy fruit. “Fucking vaultie fetishists.”

“I ain’t complaining.”

“You wouldn’t.”

There’s pomade on his fingers; he’s been touching his hair the way he always did when his pipboy got to ticking, without Ma to smack his hands away before he messed it up.

“Nova and Gob send their regards, by the way.” She rubs the gross rag over his hand, wrinkling her nose like the smell of sandalwood and motor oil’s the problem here. “Man, I wish I got to thank her for taking out Moriarty.”

“Yeah, well, he shouldn’ta hit Nova in front of her.” Though she’d of found a reason sooner or later even if Moriarty’d kept his hands to himself. They got on as well as anyone would after _what a sight for sore eyes_ , _my darlin’ bright girl, what can I get ya, on the house?_ earned his Ma’s retort: _Oh, Moriarty, you're the pimp who pisses in his booze, right? Fuck you, I brought my own._

“I think Simm’s hat is still smoking. Nova does a hell of an impression of your ma quoting Abraham Lincoln at him when he tried to lock her up.” Lona slots empties into a crate and sets it up high where they won’t get kicked and broken, then looks around for something else out of place like her daddy’s ghost is gonna come ‘round to inventory the Rudder’s stimpack and bandage supply. “He didn’t even try to give me any shit about Charon when we got home.”

“Yeah, it was pretty great.” His ma never did get over that first slaver by the Super Duper Mart who tried to throw a collar around her neck. She’d been seriously working on a plan to infiltrate the assholes in the old Lincoln Monument, was all ready to pretend she was just a huge fan of the old president, desperate to see the statue in person. Maybe if they’d run into Ilona before that mutie den, they’d actually be pulling that off right now, instead of...

“You heard they got married?”

“Who?”

“Gob an’ Nova.”

“Shit, really?”

“Yeah, well, they got a kid on the way. Gob insisted. I got back to the Capital just in time to catch the ceremony - you should of seen it.” She laughs. “Half of Underworld in town for the occasion, all slogged up in that puddle around the bomb, bleeeessed by aaaaaatom!”

“Who's the dad?”

She looks at him all firm-like. “Gob.”

He rolls his eyes. “Okay.”

“Between you and me...” She looks over her shoulder, screwing up her eyebrows. “Jericho’s pissed as hell.”

“And that's who the fuck I should care?”

“Jericho.” She rolls her eyes back at him. “You met him. He threatened to rip off your dick and choke you with it?”

“Oh. Yeah. He your old man now?”

To his relief, she gags and snaps the rag at his nose. “Don't be fucking gross.”

“I gotta be me, baby.” He drains the bottle. “I gotta be me. Fuck, I'm no Gob, but…”

“Yeah, your brain’d snap at the first lost hair,” Lona laughs again, but not like it’s so funny this time. “Are you actually jealous of _Gob_?”

“Fuck, no. But someone like Gob, raking in the caps and snagging a girl that pretty, and I'm…”

He waves vaguely at the now-tidy filth hole.

“The Butch-man wants to get tied down and raise babies?” she smirks, and shit but that girl’s still got a sharper sting in her tongue than any radscorpion. Yeah, ok, back in the day he maybe could of done better than, _Hey, since we gotta jump the broom sooner or later, you wanna get it over with?_...but she's still an asshole for bringing it up now.

So he lobs it back. “You asking? ‘Cause, I’ll be honest with ya, times’ve changed. You gotta get at the end of a long line for a dip of this baby batter now.”

She wrinkles her nose. “You are still so foul.”

“You love it.”

“I…” She picks up the rag again, letting go of his hand, and looks for something else worth cleaning. “...am working on myself right now. I'm not in a relationship kinda place.”

“It's not me, it's you. Glad you got that.”

“C’mon, Gopniki.” She throws the rag on top of the bottles, smiling a little as she stabs him with the old pet name, which one she told him meant something like “my little punk”. It was the closest she ever got to calling him anything nice. “Wanna see something cool?”

“Only ‘cause I got nothing better to do.”

She actually does lock the door behind them, and then after he’s followed her up and up and up every stair on the ship, gets them through Security’s door with the same key. He wonders if the cool thing she’s got to show him is robbing their footlockers as they sleep, but when one of the day shift guys lifts his head from the pillow, he just grunts a caveman hello like they belong there.

Past the bunks, there’s a ladder, and at the top of that, a hatch. Lona opens it carefully, letting in a blast of wind, and jerks her head for him to follow quick. Out on the old control tower, the wind’s got hands, grabbing his jacket like it wants him off the old steel and into the river. He holds tight to the railing, sure for a moment he’s gonna hurl over it, but the urge passes quick. The ship's bankward list is worse up here, or maybe it's the whiskey, but the world's definitely tilted.

“Look up.”

He shakes his head. All that sky...it's not so bad during the day, just a big upturned toilet bowl streaked with yellow clouds, no uglier than the rust-pocked ceiling over his childhood bunk, but...

She grabs his face with both hands and tilts it up until he can't help but take in those little specks, all that blackness going on and on and nothing, just goddamn nothing, holding it up, and it's not like he ever bought that shit Brotch shovelled in Religion class but now there’s no chance at all he can fool himself, for Ma’s sake.

“Look at that moon,” she insists.

It's barely there, a twist of chewed-off fingernail scraping the old monument’s broken tip. “Yeah?”

“It's pretty, right?”

“If you're into that, sure,” he sneers, wrenching away from her grip.

“It's a dead rock whipping around another, almost dead, rock.” She lets him go and leans on a railing. “That's not even its own light, just a little bit of sun pickpocketed around the earth.”

He watches her face, picking out the broad cheeks and up-tilted eyes more from memory than the weak moonlight, looking so very hard at her instead of all that nothing. “Yeah, a big ol’ sky corpse hanging over us, what's not to love?”

She grins at that. “I can't believe I've missed you.”

He doesn't smile back. It's not easy, but then neither’s he. “That the cool thing you dragged me up here to see? The fucking moon?”

She rolls her eyes and pushes away from the railing, handing him the binoculars. “I point out the moon, dumbass, because we’re lucky it’s next to new. Not enough light to give us away.”

“Give us away doing - ”

“Shut up and look over there.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you first.”

“Fuck you _sideways_.”

“Fuck you with...oh, just, fuck it, give ‘em back. And go to hell.”

He dangles the binoculars over the railing until she gives up trying to grab them, and only then looks through them out to the west. The focus is all fucked, set for her crappy eyesight, so it’s a few seconds before he twiddles green and grey smudges into a miniature battle, visible only as bright laser lines and swoops of helmet spotlights. His teeth grind together hard as he puts the relative sizes together: not people-armies in different uniforms but power armor up against a mess of big bastard mutants.

“That’s the old Jefferson Monument, where Tata tried to set up a water purifier.”

He opens his mouth, the automatic _And how is ol’ Daddy Tits_ response to her slip of the other old pet name almost out before he catches himself and smoothly replaces it with: “Oh. Like the one back in 101?”

“Hmm,” she murmurs. She definitely knows what he almost said. Damn. “Yeah, like that, except much bigger. Enclave took over before he got it running. He fried the place, with himself inside, rather than let them use it to take over D.C.”

“Shit.” He watches the battle, trying to picture ol’ beanpole Doc Waszkiewicz, nuka-bottle glasses sliding down his snub nose as he attacks a squad of those knights with nothing but his ice-cold stethoscope. “The old man had balls.”

She chokes on a laugh and clears her throat. “My hand to god, he once punched out a molerat.”

He looks doubtfully at her over the binoculars, but she only laughs again. “Hey, your ma shot out Moriarty’s ho-ho’s. There's something in the breeze out here that makes the old farts think they're Grognak.”

He snorts, smiling a little at the memory of Moriarty’s high-pitched squeals, not a single customer putting down their booze to fetch the doc before he bled out.

“Anyway, those supers down there, we drove them out to set up the purifier. Think they resettled in that den just past the riverbend.” She watches out of the corner of one eye as that sinks in before continuing. “Except maybe they got shot at too much there, after all, so they're trying to kick out the new tenants and move back in.”

He watches the two gangs bash at each other, too evenly matched for either to get an upper hand, but the mutants are definitely taking an ass-whooping they won’t forget fast.

“Thanks,” he tells her, setting down the binoculars. “That was pretty cool.”

“Oh, Butch,” she returns with a mischievous lilt, and now that his eyes have adjusted to the starlight he realises she's not leaning on the railing but an upturned gun barrel like a rocket ship, which she hauls up in both arms like it weighs...just a fucking ton, making her stagger on the uneven deck. “This is what you're out here for.”

And she heaves it on his shoulder.

“No fucking way,” he laughs, trying to stay on his feet. “Where'd you even get this?”

“Borrowed it from some friends.”

She wedges herself underneath his arm until he's steady, then props the binoculars on his shoulder. Muttering about the north-ish wind, about arcs and parabolas, she nudges him around like a compass needle, and he lets her. That sharp grip on his arm, it could be yanking him back behind the generator just before Stanley comes around the corner, or silently warning to let her do the talking as Security shoves them into the Overseer’s office, or pushing him off balance at the top of the atrium stairs so he rides his face down to the floor in front of the whole vault. Out here under all that nothing, it’s something he knows.

“Go on,” she coos, or tries to. The womanly purr dissolves into a high-pitched giggle as she braces herself behind him, moving his hand to the thick switch in the handle. Wrapped up inside her, he doesn’t think. He doesn’t need to.

The recoil almost knocks them both down, but she’s ready for it. She digs her shoulder into his back, probably bruising the shit out of each other, then bashes his cheek with hers as she fumbles the binoculars in front of their faces.

“I can’t see a thing!”

Her whine’s lost in the missile’s keen, cutting through the wind. He bumps her face out of the way and cranes his neck until he’s got both eyes magnified, laughing wildly as headlamps swing almost in unison toward them, one of them abruptly blinking out as a mutie probably takes advantage of the distraction.

“Lona, fuck, Lona - it’s so - ”

She yanks the binoculars away just before the missile lands, throwing up a mushroom-shaped ball of fire he can see just fine without it, and slams another missile into place. “Again?”

“Fuck yeah, girl.”

He bends his knees this time, leaning into the kick, and lets her watch this one fly. She doesn’t cheer, only closes her eyes as it blows, her mouth a grim slash, and lets out a slow breath. He’s the one who asks this time: “Again?”

“Yeah.”

After the fourth, they pass the binoculars back and forth for a few minutes, watching both sides of the battle scramble for cover, find themselves in foxholes with the enemy and fight back out into the open. It’s like one of those tricks she used to do with her dad’s chemistry set, dripping solutions together until the combination bubbled and rolled and, if they were lucky, blew off a big cloud of stinky vapor.

“They got no fucking idea who’s blasting them.” He wishes he had a cigarette.

“Not a clue,” she agrees with half a smile, then shakes her head. “Listen. I…”

She trails off, fussing with the binoculars’ focus until he takes them away. “Spit it out, girl, before you choke on it.”

“That’s what she said,” she murmurs, but neither of them laugh. “I don’t know what you’ve got going on here - I mean, there’s worse settlements than Rivet City. Most of them don’t even have a bar. But if you still want to see the world out here...I could maybe use a hand.”

Out of habit, he shoots the offer down before it can sink in. “Looks like you already got two.”

“Yeah, I do.”

After a moment just blinking at each other, she picks up the launcher again, balancing it low on her shoulder like she’s gonna carry it back down that tiny little ladder all by herself. He steps in front of the door.

“I didn’t mean the ones on your arms.”

“Well, I figured you didn’t, dumbass,” she snaps, setting the launcher back down before she drops it. “Could’ve just said ‘no’. God, Butch, you’re always such a little shit!”

“Or you could of…” He trails off, wishing she could just say the right thing, for once. Always been so quick to crap on him any time he tries to be good to her, but when’s she ever really acted like they were friends? “I don’t know, I mean, why the hell you’d want me along when you already got two killers trotting at your heels like a coupla kittens? You think you owe me something? Well, ya don’t. Okay?”

“How ‘bout pity? That work for you?” She crosses her arms like she means it, then laughs in his face. “Nah, I’m not carrying anybody out here. From what Wolfgang says, you can keep yourself alive, but...yeah. You’re right. I don’t need another gun.”

“Fine,” he sniffs, smoothing back the hair at his temples. “Guess this is sayonara then, sweetcheeks?”

“ _Pierdolony kutasiarzu_ ,” she groans and, quick as a centaur’s tongue, gets a dirty finger in his perfect quiff and pulls a lock of hair loose, dishevelling it just enough he’s got to get out his comb and fix the whole thing.

“ _Kurwa_ ,” he grumbles back, automatically dropping to a whisper like Doc Waszkiewicz might overhear them using the vocabulary he definitely didn’t teach the gang on one of his scotch-and-nuka nights, certainly not laughing like an elderly hyena as their tongues stumbled around all those consonants with their feet stuck out.

“I don’t actually need anything from you. But I’d like…” She shakes her head and leans on the railing, points at the flaming memorial. “Way out past that, the old Pentagon building - you ever been?”

“Nah.” After a final flip, he tucks away his comb in its special pocket. “No one gets close to it.”

“Yeah, well…” She taps the missile launcher with her foot. “I live there. Kinda. It’s complicated. I got a bunk, anyway, and if I’m a good little girl they’ll let me join for real, and...I didn’t want that, you know? I just wanted to find my dad. So I traded a few favors with people who turned out important, and to have very loud fucking mouths, and now it’s...all this. I thought if I ran off for a while they’d give up on me, but, nope! They love me. Or, I mean, close enough. Better than Amata did, anyway. And Jericho’s happier than a pig in shit with all the scav that comes of it, and Charon will literally jump off a bridge if I tell him to, and…”

She blinks up at all that nothing, the high wind making the few hairs that escaped her grim ponytail dance around her face. She really needs a haircut. Her forehead’s way too big, since she let her bangs grow out, and those eyebrows...

“Everyone listens to me. Even when they don’t, I shout at them, and they tuck under like whipped dogs.”

“And where the fuck was that magic ability every time we got hauled in from of ol’ Alphonse, huh?”

“I know!” She shouts so loud even the burning mutants have got to hear it. “Back when I wanted to get out of trash-burning: hell no young lady, you get no sweetroll ration until the garbage shaft sparkles! But now when I’m like, I think we should kill every last one of those motherfuckers, they’re all - ”

She shoots him a double thumbs-up and manic grin. “Okey-dokey, The Famous Lone Wanderer! Whatever you think is best, The Famous Lone Wanderer!”

He can’t help laughing, especially at the idea ol’ mouse-faced Lona’s as famous as that crazy Lone Wanderer chick the guy on the radio makes up stories about. “Okay, but to be fair, ‘kill every last motherfucker’ seems to be the solution to everything out here.”

“It shouldn’t be mine. I’m way worse than Stevie Mack now. Dad would be so…” She sighs, craning her neck to look at the stars above them. Probably remembering all the names for them, the ones Brotch tried to make them memorise like they’d ever see the sky.

“He’d kill every last motherfucker himself, if it kept you safe.”

At least that was his ma’s attitude. He’s got to figure the Doc’d be the same.

“He told me to run,” she whispers. “But real quick, I ran out of anywhere to run to. Shit just follows me. And then so does everyone else.”

“Yeah,” he says, and it’s mostly to shut her up, but...what the hell else is he doing? “Yeah, okay. Me too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I’ll come keep you in line. Fuck knows, someone’s gotta.”

She rubs her nose. “You’re a real humanitarian, Butchie.”

But there’s a little of that old smile underneath her hand, like she’s trying to keep it secret, the best one that always meant trouble. “Fuck that, I ain’t running no charity - you’re paying me. Or at least I get first pick off everyone we kill.”

“You can fight Jericho for that,” she says all stern, but there’s a twinkle in it. “We’re hitting a vault next, so you can stock up on all the algae nutri-bars you’ve been missing.”

He scoffs, unwilling to admit he does kinda crave them, from time to time. “Ma’d be happy I’m eating my vegetables, anyway.”

“Yeah, she would,” she agrees softly, then grins again. “We’ve got to go through a friend of mine - you’ll love him. He’s like you and ol’ Alphonse had a baby and nursed him up on vinegar for 13 years.”

“Um…” He blinks away that mental picture. “Great?”

“But for right now...I got Charon and Jericho their own room. They been arguing the last three days solid over who can drink the most moonshine the fastest, and I am not trying to sleep through that again...or cleaning up the mess tomorrow morning.”

“So…you got your own room,” he echoes, after she lets that hang there for a long moment.

“Yeah.” She spits out a loose strand of hair that’s stuck to her lip and unties her hair. It flaps around her face like some wild thing that wants to fly off, evading her fingers as she tries to smooth it back. “If you’ve got nowhere better to sleep, y’know, you’re welcome…”

“Yeah, well, of course I got…” He shuts up just before he can yap himself into another night in the common room, listening to the Cantellis scream down the hull next door. “I could keep you company, though. Turn around.”

He turns her into the wind and catches her hair, tying it back again, but more loose than she’d had it. Her face suits a little softness, and no raider’s gonna be yanking at it tonight.

She leans forward and his lips purse up for a kiss, muscle memory he hasn’t lost in what feels like decades since their little thing, but there’s no romance in the way she presses her face into his. Their noses mash together and her deep breath is more like a sob than the heaving bosoms in the old corner-crinkled romance novels they’d laughed at. When she pulls back he’s half-sure she’s gonna deck him but she just leans on his shoulder like the wind’s blown her off balance. Just an accidental bump...unless he maybe wants to take it some other way.

She leans over to pick up the last missile lined up by the door. “One more for luck?”

He’s always had shit for luck...but then, he’s never rolled dice the size she’s carrying. And, the way she’s bending down, he can’t help but remember how damn well she’s always filled out a vault suit.

So when she comes back up, that impossible death machine up on her shoulder again, he lets them tumble before he can think better of it, wrapping his arms around her waist and whispering in her ear: “Yeah, babe. Let’s blow this.”


End file.
